“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 6, 2014)

Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier’s Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it.

The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.

Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.

Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn’t had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.

The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he’s attending art-related business far away.

The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Pastan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another to try: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Bibliography:

• This Side of Married (2004)
• Lady of the Snakes (2008)
• Alena (January 2014)

“Every day the world we’re living in is increasingly turning into…a circus. Yes, I know, the comparison’s a dull one. It’s what people used to say in ancient B.G., (Before Google). It’s a compete circus! My life has turned into a circus! Politics is a circus! The word ‘circus’ was an analogy for chaos, madness, unbecoming behavior, for events that had gotten out of hand, for life’s more grotesque turns. It’s possible, though, that the word might soon regain currency. Let’s remember P. T. Barnum for a second, father of the circus and American millionaire, and his declaration that ‘no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.’ Barnum’s cynical declaration naturally doesn’t only apply to Americans. The circus is global entertainment.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (FEB 21, 2014)

Dubravka Ugresic’s new collection of cultural essays deal, primarily, with “Nostalgia,” the title of her first piece.

Ms. Ugresice is a Croatian, formally a Yugoslavian, who now lives in Amsterdam.

Her essays delve into politics, history, popular US, Yugoslavian and European culture from the 1950’s to the 21st century, as well as her own thoughts and flights of fancy. She is branded a “Yugonostalgnic,” by many of her fellow countrymen and women. This is a derogatory term, a synonym for those who long for the days of the Yugoslavia of yore under the reign of Tito; dinosaurs who look back fondly to the slogan “brotherhood and unity.”

Her “Yugonostalgia” began before the death of Tito, before the unified country of Yugoslavia broke up into six different states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Serbia. “Back then I was haunted by an unnerving premonition that the world around me was about to suddenly vanish.” She wonders if she has developed what psychologists call LAT, or “Low Authoritarianism Syndrome.”

The collection’s first essay, which really captivated me, has the author visiting New York City in 2011. She is searching for Zucotti Park during the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. She asks a stranger, “Excuse me, where’s the ah, revolution.” She wonders if “a long dormant rebel virus” was stirring in her.

She visits Washington Square in New York City’s Greenwich Village and laments the absence of the “dropouts, the refuseniks, the superfluous men and women, the alcoholics and smokers, the homeless, the pickpockets the vagrants, the hustlers, the grumblers grumbling to themselves, the idlers, the losers, the dreamers,” of before…the Washington Square Park as she remembers it.

The author was born in 1949, around the time when Marshall Josip Broz Tito, a statesman, revolutionary and authoritarian head of the post WWII state of Yugoslavia, told Soviet dictator Stalin “NO!” He modeled his economic development plan independently from Moscow, which resulted in a diplomatic escalation followed by a bitter exchange of letters in which Tito affirmed that although his country would follow the examples of the Soviet system, his country would remain separate from Russia and the Eastern Bloc Countries. Ms. Ugresic seems to be having trouble with what the future has brought. She asks herself, “What in her lifetime of civil war, new passports and fractured identities, betrayals, etc., had actually been realized of all the things promised to us by communists’ ideologues.”

She reflects on a post Soviet Union world, “a BG, (Before Google),” world. However, although she paints the past with artificial colors, (which she is very much aware of), she really doesn’t want to turn time back, but is not happy with life in the present. The author quotes Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher, cultural theorist TV host and columnist, “Europe no longer loves life. The radiance of historical fulfillment is gone, in its place only exhaustion, the entropic qualities of an aging culture,” a reign of “spiritual nakedness.” Yes, she agrees, “Europe is in decay.”

With a wry, often quirky sense of humor, she does riffs on 21st century Europe – western and eastern. The essays contain comments on the Netherlands, where undocumented immigrants are not wanted. Here Poles are branded as thieves – they are blamed for everything that goes wrong. Even the Polish prostitutes flourish, taking work away from Amsterdam’s ever famous “ladies” who work their trade in the infamous red light district. As far as Hungary goes – they are “anti-Semitic and despise the Roma, (gypsies).” She muses on formerly great Russian literature and Europe’s neglected film industry, where only yesterday directors, i.e., Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Lina Wertmueller, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Goddard, Sergei Eisenstein, Michelangelo Antonioni, etc., created cinematic masterpieces. She even mentions the popularity of aquarium ownership among wealthy young men, to the marginalization of unattractive people.

There are also pieces ranging from her travels to USA’s Midwest and her native Zagreb, from Ireland to Israel. There are lots of personal anecdotes here. Her insights on the people she meets in her travels are perceptive. Like an anthropologist, she analyzes the norms of the times and writes of “Lookism.” ” ‘Lookism’ is a widespread and very powerful prejudice based on a person’s physical appearance.” It is discriminatory. Fat people are targeted as ugly. Even Sak’s Fifth Avenue has closed their plus-size department. Fat people and smokers are “intolerable social evils.”

The “Sepia” from the title refers to the past…to old photographs in sepia.

These essays are passionate, intriguing, and skillfully written. They should appeal to those who are curious about the take on today’s world by a woman who is the product of both a communist regime and the “now” of the 21st century. Highly recommended. (Translated from the Croatian by David Williams.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Open Letter Books; Reprint edition (February 18, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dubravka Ugresic
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Bibliography:

• In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories (1992)
• Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1993)
• The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998)
• Lend Me Your Character (2004)
• The Ministry of Pain (2005)
• Nobody’s Home (2007)
• Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009)

Non-fiction:

• Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994)
• The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1998)
• Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia (2003)
• Karaoke Culture (2011)
• Europe in Sepia (February 2014)

“Everything began as a joke–or some things did anyway–but not everything ended as one.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (AUG 22, 2009)

The main character of this novel, Jeff Attman, is a globe trotting art critic and journalist. But he hates his job, even hates writing, which can pose a problem for a print journalist. He keeps at it because it affords him the opportunity to use an expense account to do what he really loves: drink, take recreational drugs, chase women, drink more, occasionally exercise his rapier wit, use more drugs. You get the idea. He is fun loving and intelligent. He is a kick, the type of guy whose company you would probably enjoy, albeit in limited measures.

We follow Attman from London to Venice, where he is attending the city’s annual art festival, the Biennale. He is there on assignment for the art magazine Kulchure. He is to write an interview, take a picture of his subject and ask to borrow a drawing made of her by a former lover. He gets the interview, but fails at the other duties, which gives rise to self loathing and frustration. He simply hates everything, but for the aforementioned activities. And he hates himself. He feels that he has wrung his life dry. “It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.” He is, as we say, simply going through the motions.

It is critical to understand the importance of his name, Attman. Atman, with one t, in Hindu philosophy is the name, the pronoun, for the essential self, the core of being. Atman, the pronoun, survives death and transmigrates to a new life. Attman, the noun, our man Jeff, is exhausted by his lifestyle, his work, his play and ultimately his own core being. This is important, because book two, Death in Varanasi, later finds our hero on the Ganges, as an individual undergoing a transformation. But let’s not rush out of Venice just yet.

Central to the story-telling of Jeff in Venice, is a wonderful cat and mouse romance between Jeff and a woman he meets at a Biennale party, Laura Freeman, a gallery manager. He falls for her instantly, and finds himself uncharacteristically stymied and dumbstruck: “A voice in his head was saying, Act normal, act normal, say something normal. Don’t act like a nutter.” They banter and it is fun:

“It’s a great dress,” he said. “But, frankly, it wouldn’t be anything without the shoulders. And most importantly of all…the collarbones.”

“Well, thank you again.” He had spoken honestly. Her shoulders were not wide; they were bony but strong-looking.

“I suppose I should return the compliment.”

“Please. Don’t feel you have to.”

“No, I want to. I really do.”

“Ok. Maybe the shirt.” He held out his arms, a gesture that was part display and part shrug.

“It is a nice shirt.”

“Thank you. Look, I know I had to drag that out of you, but, well, it’s my favorite shirt. I feel it’s so…”

“Blue?”

“No.”

“Wrinkled?”

“No. Though I admit I could have folded and packed it more carefully. No, the word I was looking for was ‘manly.’ Sorry, I shouldn’t have said it. You were right on the brink of getting it anyway.”

“Was I?” I thought I was going to say ‘cheap-looking.’”

We are happy for Jeff. He and Laura make such a nice couple. And they have ever so much fun having sex together, taking drugs and getting drunk, all of Jeff’s favorite sports. We keep waiting for the shoe to drop, for something to come along and mess everything up. A spouse, or work, a deception, anything–but it never does. They are a happy couple, genuinely–though not committed. And by the end of the Biennale, Laura is off to lands unknown. She is going to quit her gallery job and see the world. “The places everyone goes. South-East Asia. India.” At the end of Jeff in Venice, our hapless soul-searching journalist-critic is broken-hearted and desolate. He is empty. Jeff in Venice ends.

Then the story picks up again, an undisclosed amount of time later (one gets the sense it has been while), in India, in Varanasi, at the turn of the Ganges, where everything spiritual is reputed to have congealed. “Varanasi made going anywhere else seem nonsensical. All of time was here, and probably all of space too. The city was a mandala, a cosmogram. It contained the cosmos.”

The story changes voices. No longer do we have a narrator telling us what Jeff is doing; rather, he is driving now–first person narration–and informing us directly. This is important, as Death in Varanasi is all about that core being, Atman, of which only Jeff can convincingly inform.

Varanasi. He stays. In Jeff in Venice he dyes his hair, looking for an edge, a more youthful look (he is 45). In Death in Varanasi he cuts it, his hair, except for “a little pigtail at the back of the head, as I had seen on mourners.” And a bit later, he confesses, “I am mourning for myself.” Our hero, and indeed he now is one, having realized and striven to overcome his deficiencies and shortcomings, is on a path which will render his former self dead–thus the title–and deliver up a transformative being.

The second book gives us a depth of character in Jeff that is not readily apparent in book one. Yes, we recognize the Jeff of Venice to be sharp as a tack and funny. But we don’t realize the vacancy of being he is subject to. Nor do we have an appreciation of his ability to self reflect until he makes his way to Varanasi. There, we find him transformed from his previous Venetian self. “I didn’t renounce the world; I just became less interested in certain aspects of it, less involved with it…” I found the two books–or sections–simultaneously at odds, yet complimentary. The traditional reader in me wanted more of a narrative connection between the two; but the reader risk-taker liked the gap, as Dyer himself calls it. It was jazz-like, a riff where you know there is a connection, but can’t put your finger on it. Dyer said in an interview of the narrative distance between the two books: “Instead of papering over the gap, I’d accentuate it, make the two parts completely distinct. Instead of trying to make the narrative rope thicker and stronger, I’d just have these tiny, almost invisible filaments linking the sections, all these little echoes, chimes and rhymes.” It succeeded wonderfully in this fashion.

There is a quality to this story which I find immensely refreshing, a manner of spirit in the telling that gives one confidence and hope. It is not a stretch to say it makes one think that this is what Dostoyevsky would have written like had he actually had a good day. This is a wonderful book. A great and edifying story well told.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 76 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (April 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Geoff Dyer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Missing of the Somme Others to check out:   And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Raymond + Hannah by Stephen Marche The Story of My Baldness by Marke van der Jagt

Bibliography:

• The Colour of Memory (1989)
• The Search (1993)
• The Missing of the Somme (1994; 2011)
• Paris Trance: A Romance (1998; 2010)
• Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi ( 2009)

Nonfiction

• Ways of Telling: Work of John Berger (1987)
• But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1991)
• The Search (1993)
• Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H.Lawrence (1997)
• Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures, 1984-98 (1999)
• Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2003)
• The Ongoing Moment (2005)
• Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays & Reviews (2011)
• Zona (2012)
• The Contest of the Century (February 2014)

“She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children.  Now, she felt she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared…”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Poornima Apte (AUG 13, 2009)

The very first page of Colm Toibin’s new novel sets the stage beautifully: In Enniscorthy, a small town in Ireland, Eilis Lacey looks out the window as her more glamorous sister, Rose, returns from a game of golf with her professional acquaintances. Rose has an important job, provides for the family and is the arbiter of most conversations the homely Eilis shares with her mother. It is Rose who pays the bills and who writes letters of condolence when near and dear ones pass away. She is accorded all the importance and seat at the table that a primary wage earner in the 50’s was. When Eilis looks out the window, it’s as if an adoring child is watching a parent return home.

So it comes as no surprise when, after a visiting priest from Brooklyn, Father Flood, suggests that Eilis should look for opportunities in America, the decision is already made for her. Rose decides her sister must go to the land of opportunity—to seek out a better life—perhaps even one that might make some use of the beginning bookkeeping skills she has learned in Ireland.

Eilis, who has learned to forever be obedient, to bend to everyone else’s wishes, is not sure she wants to emigrate but emigrate she does—to Brooklyn—in a painful journey by ship. Father Flood sets up her living arrangements with a fellow expat Mrs. Kehoe, and Eilis soons learns to adjust to her living conditions and her new more worldly-wise roommates. She gets a job on the sales floor at a local department store and even takes up bookkeeping classes at a college to keep her evenings busy and structured. Eilis hopes to maybe one day even move on a to a real bookkeeping job in the city.

Father Flood, through his parish, arranges for social events, and some of these are dances. It is at one such dance that Eilis meets Tony—a young Italian, who asks her out. In true form, Eilis can’t say “No.” Slowly she begins to realize that Tony is the real deal—a caring and loving man, someone she could set up a home with and spend the rest of her life loving.

Just as things get serious between her and Tony, Eilis receives news from home that forces her to return. Once home she begins to evaluate her life in Ireland through a new lens. It remains to be seen whether her experiences abroad will color her perceptions of life in the small town or not. “It made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew,” Toibin writes of her return to Ireland.

The woman who until very recently has lead a very sheltered existence, finds the other side a mirage, as a mere fantasy, wherever she is. When Eilis is in Brooklyn, she gets caught up in its daily pace yet back in Ireland, everything that happened in America seems like it was part of a dream.

The high point of Brooklyn is the strong character studies. Toibin does a wonderful job of portraying the dynamics of women and their small foibles—whether through the interactions of Eilis with her roommates in Brooklyn or her friends and family in Ireland.

The Lacey women—especially Eilis, whom Toibin sketches precisely and beautifully, come through vividly. And this, for some, can also be a problem. One can find malleable and timid Eilis a tad tiring after a while. She can never say “No”—to her mother, to friends in Ireland who ask her out, to her sister, to Tony. After a while you begin to wish that instead of letting life just happen to her, that she invest more energy in shaping her future. Of course one could also argue that it is exactly because Eilis is so malleable that she reflects the immigrant experience so precisely. Eilis is a blank canvas. She changes nothing—instead she lets things change her. The reader has to give Toibin this much: Till the very end, perhaps vexingly so, Eilis stays true to her character.

Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is a quiet and studied reflection on what it means to set roots in unfamiliar ground. It is worth a read even if one might occasionally wish for a protagonist with a little more spunk.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 285 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Colm Tóibín
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of The Master

Bibliography:

• The South (1990)
• The Heather Blazing (1992)
• The Story of the Night (1997)
• The Blackwater Lightship (2000)
• The Master (2004)
• Mothers and Sons (2007)
• Brooklyn (2009)
• The Empty Family: Stories (2010)
• The Testament of Mary (November 2012)

Non-fiction:

• Walking Along the Border (1987)
• The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994)
• The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Duncan (1997)
• The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (2000)
• Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002)
• Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Blackwater Lightship (2004)